Ernest Hemingway was one of a group of artists in the inter-war period of the early twentieth century who was left mentally (and for Hemingway also physically) scarred by the total devastation he witnessed during and after the Great War. Gertrude Stein labeled Hemingway and his peers "a Lost Generation", a famous phrase that only partially describes the detachment, confusion, instability, and distrust that these twenty- and thirty-somethings felt toward many of the traditional ways of life that had led to the brutal, total war which had eradicated much of the people of their age group. To cope with the feelings of meaninglessness and nothingness they had in their lives in the modern world, these artists developed personalized value systems which were reflected and transmitted through their work.
             Hemingway's personal value system has been termed "the code", and has to do mainly with struggle and growth toward awareness as a process taught via example by a tutor figure to a student figure, the tyro. The tutor figure is what critics call the code-hero, and his stoic tutelage is usually manifested in some manner of 'birth under fire' to the tyro, who is often only a shell of a human, a corrupted soul, and is virtually the 'living dead'. Through the tutor's example, the tyro can struggle toward an awareness of nada, the term for the omnipresent void of modern life, and through confronting nada perhaps win back his life from moral and emotional bankruptcy. The tutor teaches the tyro how to cope with nada. This essay will examine Hemingway's code and how it confronts nada as it is played out in one of his most exemplary tutor-tyro duos, Wilson and Francis in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber".
             Understanding Hemingway's common structural figures will help to illuminate the action in the story as well as the process of Wilson's tutelage and Francis' growth. One structure in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is tha...